Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies.
An important contribution to literary studies, Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination asks a number of crucial questions: can literature help us undo centuries of thinking about the subject and the world in which the subject moves? McGee engages the work of Baruch Spinoza and contemporary philosophers such as Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou in order to show how William Blake, Victor Hugo and James Joyce challenge the sovereignty of that subject and the regime of truth that supports it. By showing how these writers exemplify Spinoza's ontology of immanence, which knits the individual to a world of ideas and thoughts beyond her, McGee reveals that they were already part of the transindividual singularity that we might call 'literature and theory.'
